MEGA Support: Matt Oguz Of Istanta Capital On Their MEGA Investment

Matt Oguz comes from a professional background in ecommerce, analytics, behavioral economics and decision sciences. Earlier in his career, he built big data solutions for a number of Fortune 500 companies such as Dow Corning, Coca Cola and General Electric. Matt started CostCaptain.com in 2005, a leading ecommerce company that caters to the education buyers from K12 to Universities. In 2006, Matt wrote a negotiation management software platform for car dealerships and licensed out to leading dealership chains. In 2008, he built an independent stock rating platform that extracts large buy and sell transactions of mutual funds and calculates stock ratings based on this information. Having invested as an angel investor since 2005, Matt started Istanta Capital in 2012, an emerging fund that focuses on early stage startups.

Istanta is offering $25K in seed investment to a MEGA Startup Weekend Winner, and Matt answered some questions about their investment:

AS: How did you hear about MEGA Startup Weekend?

MO: Industry news.

AS: What made you want to get involved with Startup Weekend?

MO: This was my first time attending the event. I was amazed by the breadth and depth of the startups there vs. other hackathons. The entrepreneurs in all three categories seemed serious about turning their ideas into startups then to real businesses. We are in talks with more than one team already.

AS: Have you/Istanta made a similar offer at any other Startup Weekend event?

MO: This is a rare offer, but yes, we have offered something similar at two other events, including Stanford’s eBootcamp 2012, in which we were the only fund that offered seed stage funding.